Principal Data Engineer

Group One Trading • Chicago, IL

9h • Onsite

About The Position

Our Principal Data Engineer owns the architecture and technical direction of the data platform that powers trading analysis, reporting, and decision-making across Group One. They work closely with traders, risk, finance, and technology leadership to understand how data is produced and consumed across the firm, and translate those needs into a platform designed for reliability, scalability, and long-term evolution. Data usage is expanding rapidly across every part of our firm, and we are building a next-generation data platform to support it. Our existing Microsoft-based environment gives us a strong foundation and deep understanding of our data as we design what comes next. This role will define that future: evaluating technologies, selecting the architecture, establishing engineering standards, and defining a migration strategy that delivers value early while moving us deliberately toward the target platform. You will partner closely with our Senior Data Engineers who serve as the primary builders of the platform and provide technical leadership to the broader data team throughout the transition. We are looking for someone who has designed modern data platforms before, has lived with the consequences of their own architectural decisions, and knows how to make decisive technical choices while remaining open to being challenged by the engineers building alongside them.

Requirements

• Extensive experience designing, building, and evolving production data platforms, including at least one significant modernization or migration from a legacy architecture
• Deep expertise in modern data architectures and the trade-offs among cloud data warehouses, lakehouses, batch and streaming systems, orchestration frameworks, transformation tooling, and event-driven architectures
• Experience evaluating and working with technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, dbt, Kafka, or comparable platforms
• Strong command of data architecture principles, including data modeling, storage and compute architecture, governance, lineage, security, reliability, and cost management
• Expert-level SQL and strong proficiency in Python or a comparable language, with the ability and inclination to remain hands-on
• Working familiarity with the Microsoft data stack-including MSSQL, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, and Power BI-sufficient to understand existing workloads and design a pragmatic migration path
• Demonstrated technical leadership, including mentoring experienced engineers, driving architectural decisions, and building consensus across teams with competing requirements
• Sound judgment around architectural trade-offs, build-versus-buy decisions, vendor selection, and production change risk

Responsibilities

• Owns the architecture and technical direction of the data platform.
• Works closely with traders, risk, finance, and technology leadership to understand data needs.
• Translates data needs into a platform designed for reliability, scalability, and long-term evolution.
• Evaluates technologies, selects architecture, establishes engineering standards, and defines a migration strategy.
• Partners closely with Senior Data Engineers and provides technical leadership to the broader data team.
• Establishes engineering standards around infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, testing, observability, and data quality.
• Communicates complex architectural decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Leads the technical direction of the data engineering team.
• Develops the engineers around them.
• Partners with technology and business leadership on the longer-term roadmap for data.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Performance-based bonus
• 401(k) and Roth 401(k) retirement plans with employer matching
• Medical, dental, vision
• Generous vacation time
• Paid holidays
• Parental leave
• Flexible spending accounts (FSA) for health care, dependent daycare, and parking or mass transit expenses

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed